Grand Masquerade
by Mylaea
Summary: Hermione discovers a discrepancy between house points and wants to disover why; Professor Severus Snape may have something to do with it...


Masquerade  
  
What is life, But a grand masquerade? Everyday, I see people passing by, Wearing a smile, When they cry, Wearing a tear, When they really feel glad inside.  
  
What is life, But a grand masquerade? Everywhere, I see lies, Spoken though smiling lips, With teeth behind them. Friendly gestures, That end with fists.  
  
What is life, But a grand masquerade? Everyone, Has their role to play, No matter if they like it, Or if they don't, They will just have to hid their disappointment, Behind a smiling face.  
  
What is life, But a grand masquerade? Every time, I wonder who I have just meet, What they are hiding, And why. I wonder, Who is behind that mask.  
  
But the again, There are times, When the masquerade stops. When someone looks beneath the mask, At the face it hides. And that, Is when love happens. For what is a masquerade without a dance? What is life, Without a love?  
  
~*~  
  
Hermione had known since the second week of her seventh year. After spending a sufficient amount of time in the library, she had happened along a book, a fairly large volume, bound in dusty black leather. There was no title, and it needed none, for the contents were self-explanatory. The parched yellow pages kept a record of points taken or given away to the students of Hogwarts, and it would show the points given or taken when you wrote the place on the first page. The writing would absorb into the book exactly one minute after it was written, and the book's blank pages would fill with the records of what teacher took or gave how many points to whom that particular school year, and why.  
She had always kept close track of the house points, she really did want to win after all, and soon she noticed a discrepancy between the points in the book and the points shown in the large hourglasses that were available for viewing in the school. Hermione figured she had all of the places down: classrooms, halls, dormitories, outdoors, etc., but there was always a discrepancy of anywhere from zero to one hundred points when she checked the book every month.  
She decided, that rainy day in her last year, when the pain of being excluded and thought of as a snobbish bookworm didn't have the power to hurt her as it once did, that she would find out why there was that discrepancy.  
  
~*~  
  
They filed into class, following one another like animals, two or three of them huddled into clumps of stupidity and arrogance, little globules of fat clogging the arteries of knowledge in this place of learning. He studied them, one by one. Although he knew Trelawney's bungle was hogwash, he felt that he had a sense of people, that he could tell mainly what they were like and how they thought and felt from the first meeting. But others. others remained a mystery, and they irritated him to no end.  
The class was chattering and twittering their gossip as he stood up to silence them, and he gave his usual speech. It came so easily now he could say it without thinking, and he liked to use that time to study exactly who paid attention and who wrote notes and who fluffed their hair and who obsessed about the other gender.  
He started his interrogations, and immediately his conscious snapped back into place with his unconscious. He needed to pay attention to their answers, to their hesitations.  
As he studied them all to see whom he would strike at first, he saw the fear and apprehension written on almost all of their faces. and if not on their faces, hidden behind a mask of arrogance and boredom. He knew that almost everyone hated him, but he was so unusually frank and bluntly honest with people that it almost immediately turned them off. He didn't bother to try to impress people who tried to impress others, people who wasted their time wouldn't waste his.  
His eyes came across a boy with messy black hair. and as he focused on the boy, he realized who this boy was when he saw the boy's shockingly green eyes. This was Lily's son, Lily, the one woman he had truly loved, Lily, who had pretended to stick up for him, Lily, who had pretended to be so nice to him, and Lily, who had pretended to hate James. Lily, who was perhaps the grandest masquerader of them all. His naïve love for her had been so rudely put out by she herself, that the pain he still felt was exactly as if she had taken a still-lit cigar and crushed it into his heart, leaving a burnt and blackened hole, which had spread to consume his entire heart.  
All of this he felt in a fraction of a second, but he never conveyed it on his face. Any emotion that anyone knew about was something they could use against him. In fact, anything at all they knew about him was some sort of weapon.  
As he interrogated the Potter boy, one girl in particular took his attention. He had noticed her before, of course, and knew that she was not a willing participant of the grand masquerade. He had been disappointed that she wasn't in Ravenclaw, Gryffindor had not done her brains justice, from what the other professors had been telling him already.  
He studiously ignored her, for if her pandered to her as he knew the other teachers would, she would get soft, and feel as if she had nothing to work for, no one to impress. He had a feeling that she could do fine on her own, but he did not want to ruin any future minds such as this. because when the great war broke out, they would need every available mind. Besides, he didn't think it fair for some teachers to pander to others and ignore others. he studied Lucious Malfoy's son, grinning to his cronies about Potter's inability to answer, and bitter feelings of resentment rose in him again as he remembered being passed over while the teachers chose to call on the more outgoing but obtuse students.  
Potter again drew attention to the girl, who was stretching her arm so high that it looked as if it would be put out of socket and any moment. If only Potter would keep to his own business, things would be moving much more smoothly. Already the other students had begun to whisper, no doubt figuring amongst themselves that this greasy, ugly git was obviously ignoring the girl, even though Snape knew that they themselves did not like her, most of them not even bothering to hide it.  
As he heard her spout off a stream of shockingly accurate answers, as though releasing the pressure from building steam, Professor Severus Snape decided that this girl, like himself, was one of the few who had noticed that they were part of life's grand masquerade, and had taken shelter in knowledge to hide the fact that they were scared to death of the masks, bright colors, and most of all, of the people.  
  
~*~  
  
Remember, this was not beta-read. Poem by Steve Qin  
  
These characters do not belong to me, they belong to Jo Rowling. 


End file.
